law enforcement

The FBI has publicly disclosed its intent to get at the “mission critical” Twitter firehose through third party monitoring service Dataminr. But Twitter, which has a 5 percent stake in Dataminr and of course has sovereign control over the firehose, recently told the company to stop providing data to intelligence agencies. So what’s happening here? Read More

The U.K. government has agreed on an amendment to draft surveillance legislation aimed at strengthening the public perception of privacy safeguards by adding a statement of priority to the face of the legislation. Read More

The Barnacle is a new way for parking patrols to immobilize vehicles. Instead of using a boot to keep a wheel from moving, officers can slap a Barnacle across the windshield, suction it to the glass, and arm it with a keypad.
The Barnacle is a bright yellow 20-pound piece of plastic that sticks to the windshield with 750 pounds of force. The parking enforcement officer only has to pump the… Read More

In the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations about mass surveillance programs some startups with concerns about overreaching government requests for user data settled on Switzerland as a base for their business — owing to what they dubbed favorable privacy laws. However, they might need to have a rethink after the Swiss public approved more invasive state surveillance powers in a… Read More

Airbnb received 188 requests for users’ data from governments around the world in the first six months of this year, according to the company’s first-ever transparency report. The home-sharing company provided data in response to 82 of those requests.
Airbnb is publishing a transparency report as part of its Community Compact, an initiative to make the company more transparent to… Read More

The UK government has agreed to an independent review of so called “bulk collection” — aka mass surveillance — powers in proposed new surveillance legislation, one of the most controversial elements of the Investigatory Powers bill which is currently before parliament. It’s aiming to get the bill onto the statute books before the end of this year. Read More

Putting body cameras on police seems like a net good for everyone involved, but how to deploy them and what the subtler effects will be are questions that would be better answered sooner than later. Otherwise, as a new large-scale study shows, we risk making things worse — body cameras could actually increase incidents of violence. Read More

One for those of us with a lead foot: Ford is rolling out a new Speed Limiter feature. The car uses a camera to read the speed limit signs before giving you a heads up if your velocity is making you a police-magnet. For now, the technology is only being rolled out on the company’s European line of cars, but that market is a particularly good match: There are more than 35,000 speed… Read More

Uber released its first-ever transparency report today, following in the footsteps of other major technology companies and detailing the kinds of information it shares about riders and drivers with the U.S. government.
Between July and December 2015, Uber disclosed information about 14 million users to law enforcement and regulatory agencies, according to its report. Most of the data —… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

After John Oliver used humor to tackle the U.S. surveillance reform debate last year, to try to get Americans to care about online privacy — via the mass medium of, er, dick pics — U.K. comedy duo Cassetteboy is attempting something similar, using its trademark video cut-up parody format to slice through all the government spin around UK surveillance legislation… Read More

Reddit issued its annual transparency report Thursday morning, listing the amount and type of data requested by various authorities. There’s plenty of interesting info, but perhaps most interesting is what’s not there: the site’s “warrant canary.” Read More

While the Apple vs FBI court battle has drawn all eyes to the question of what should be considered ‘reasonable assistance’ for companies to provide law enforcement agencies, over in the UK the government is attempting to enshrine in law surveillance capabilities that would enable state agencies to compel even very small startups to bake insecurities into their systems in order to… Read More

A third UK parliamentary committee has now published a report on the government’s draft surveillance legislation. The report of the joint select committee, which is made up of a majority of Conservative MPs and Peers, takes a more supine approach than the ISC committee report earlier this week… Read More

A new transatlantic data transfer deal has been announced today between the EU and the US. The new EU-US Privacy Shield replaces the old Safe Harbor agreement, which was invalidated by the European Court of Justice last October, on the grounds that US mass surveillance programs were violating fundamental European privacy rights. Read More

Since the 2013 Snowden disclosures revealed the extent of government surveillance programs it’s been a standard claim by intelligence agencies, seeking to justify their push for more powers, that their ability to track suspects using new technologies is under threat because of growing use of end-to-end encryption by technology companies. Read More

State lawmakers and the District of Columbia have put together a group of bills pushing for legislation to protect our digital privacy. The coalition of 16 states and D.C. say surveillance technology and a lack of regulation has given Big Brother too much power when it comes to monitoring online information.
“A bipartisan consensus on privacy rights is emerging, and now the states… Read More

This year the U.K. has a historic opportunity to lead the world in creating a transparent legal framework for the operation of secret state surveillance powers. But there is a parallel risk of forging bad law and encouraging other countries down a similarly problematic path. The stakes could not be higher… Read More

Senators and House representatives this week are calling on Congress to act on bills that would limit location tracking and phone surveillance after the Supreme Court decided not to hear a cell phone case earlier this week.
The justices on Monday declined to review a federal court’s decision from earlier this year that police do not need a warrant to seize and search cell phone records… Read More